Sweet Romance15 min read
My Last Assignment: Fix the World, Keep the Gold Soul
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I blinked awake to the system chime in my skull and grinned like an idiot.
"Host, welcome to the one-thousandth world," the voice said.
"Finally," I breathed. "One more, then retirement."
"Prepare. Destination incoming."
"Please," I whispered, folding my hands. "Give me something big. Give me riches, harem, a relaxed retirement."
"Transmission complete."
I checked down where a respectable cheat-sheet would have been. Empty.
"Okay, system," I muttered. "You owe me."
When I looked up, a pretty girl in a pale yellow robe stood over me, face twisted with contempt. A sharp slap cracked across my left cheek and the world tasted like iron.
"Gia Stephens," the girl hissed. "You really think you can show up here and—"
Her name was Lena Buckner. The other woman, who came next, had a hatred that wore like armor: Estelle Hofmann. She smelled of vinegar and cruelty.
"You want to go to the sect meeting?" Lena spat. "Dream on."
Then she did something stupid: she shoved a hairpin into my arm.
"Ow!" I snapped, and then I smiled.
"You're not very nice," I said, soft as silk.
Lena's hand swung. I stepped aside without thinking—and without effort. Her wrist popped under my fingers like a toy. A hairpin clattered to the floor. Her face drained to clay.
"How—" Estelle snarled and lunged.
"I told you I'm frail," I said, letting the words be a fingernail over a cracked plate. "I faint at the breeze."
I flicked my wrist. Her hand flew up and she went through the door frame like a puppet. The world was too pretty to be this mean, but I had been inside a hundred thousand systems. I knew what level of nonsense to expect.
"Who are you?" Lena croaked, stunned on the floor.
"Someone retiring soon," I said, and I sat on the dusty stool like a queen.
The system, of course, pretended not to hear.
"System, you jerk! Answer!" I pounded my fist.
"Request received. Check mail," the system said.
A crate appeared. Inside: a red dress, medicinal supplies, a foot-soak bucket. Small mercies.
"Fine," I said, patching my arm in the little room and changing. "If we can't have riches, we can have dignity."
"Don't be cocky," Estelle warned, stepping forward. She drew a thin spirit blade with a huff.
"You're really throwing a sword?" I asked. "At me?"
She pressed and my fingers closed like a clamp. The blade cracked.
"You—" Estelle's eyes bulged. Her practiced cruelty had never met someone who could not be bullied. She tried to run. I tossed a rope like a carnival prize into the storage room and stuffed Estelle and Lena in with two rotten buckets.
"Temperature control," I said, because even petty punishers deserve consequences.
They stank until morning. I slept like an absolute trash queen.
When I walked out, an army of people rushed for the sect recruitment grounds. The continent name was familiar to every system handbook: Qilin Land. Combat spirits, sect politics, recruitment—ideal bug territory. I wanted the Bai Lan sect. The system told me there was a bug there: it spread a culture of violence and excuses. I wanted to fix it and then go home.
Two scrawny disciples were playing arm-wrestling on a low platform where the Bai Lan recruitment booth was supposed to be. They stood when I approached.
"Is this Bai Lan?" I asked.
They beamed. "Yes! This is Bai Lan! Little sister, do you wish to join?" One was Lennox Copeland. The other was Jagger Roy.
"I can join," I said and smiled big.
"You like what?" Lennox whispered. "We must give the little sister a proper welcome."
"I like incense, a wooden fish, sutras," I lied. "Also vegetables."
They stared at me like I'd asked for the moon.
"Vegetables?"
"Yes," I said. "Leafy, green salvation."
Lennox puffed with pride. "We'll bring you a banquet."
Only later did I realize Bai Lan's "banquet" had meat piled like a funeral pyre, and that their hunger for fighting came from being underfed of anything gentle like greens. I fixed that in thirty minutes. The system finally sent me a basket of greens because it could not watch me nag forever.
"Repeat after me," I said, slapping a pot. "Alms for peace. Line up."
They lined up like ragged puppies. I cooked. They ate. They quieted.
"Thanks, little sister," Jagger said, licking the bowl clean.
They were idiots, but not beyond help. They needed structure. They needed someone to teach them to breathe before they punch.
"You're staying," Lennox told me a day later, thrusting a robe at me.
I felt the system's tiny stinger: this sect had to be rebalanced. "Fine," I said. "We'll do it your way for now."
That's when the test pillar showed gold.
"Put your hand on the pillar," Lennox said, grinning like a bankrupt tailor.
I didn't expect anything. I rested my palm on the pillar and something sweet went through my arm. Colors spun: purple, red, then—gold. The pillar screamed gold and the whole courtyard went quiet.
"That's—" Lennox said. "Gold? Gold Spirit? Impossible."
"World's luck," I muttered.
They ran through the ritual steps, gasping. I shrugged until someone poked at my arm.
"You know how to cultivate?" Lennox asked.
"Nope," I said honestly.
"How can you be a gold spirit and not cultivate?" the disciples asked like someone had set the sun in their pocket.
"Wrong body, long history," I said. "World-bug fixer, remember?"
They were giddy and terrified. To be a gold spirit was to be a treasure. They called me Little Gold. I called them hungry boys.
We had barely settled when two stinky stragglers—my stepmother Estelle and Lena—barged in, still dripping from the bucket I had thrown them into. Nearby disciples gagged.
"They're from her house?" a disciple hissed.
"She hit me," I said coolly. "She dug a hairpin in my arm."
"It will be handled," Lennox lied at first, then his face changed. He wanted to do it big and public to show that Bai Lan could be law. I didn't stop him.
"Public hearing," I said. "Bring them when the sect hall is full."
On the morning of the gathering, the courtyard smelled like incense and sweat. A hundred people had assembled: disciples from neighboring sects, merchants, elders. I stood at the dais. Estelle and Lena were dragged in, faces painted with indignation.
"Little sister," Estelle began, "you are a liar."
"You're cruel and you swing knives at children," Lennox answered. "We will hear the truth."
"She will say anything to make us look bad," Estelle snapped.
"Speak," I said.
They had rehearsed it: their pride sat tall—until I produced a sealed strip of jade that the system had dropped in my inventory. I set it on the lectern, and with Lennox I triggered projection. Images spilled across the hall: Lena's cruel taunts, Estelle's knife, the days we had been starved. The crowd watched, slow and unwanted, as the worst footage played across the open sky like a cruel stage.
Estelle's expression moved from confident to shocked in the first three frames.
"What is that?" she hissed, voice thin.
"Proof," I said.
"That's forgery!" she cried, clasping at straws.
"Explain why you put a hairpin in my arm," I asked.
Lena cried out, "She stole our place! She wanted to join the sect to shame us!"
"You put fingernail marks in my wrists," I said. "You spoke of me as a drain. You told me you'd 'take my spirit' if I spoke."
"The projection is fake! You staged this to destroy me!" Estelle wailed, suddenly proud, then frantic.
"Not fake." Lennox stepped forward. "She has this barn testimony, the work girls—"
"We'll hear final words from the witnesses!" I called, and three girls from the village stepped forward with bruised arms and the smell of dung in their clothes. They told what they'd seen. The crowd began to murmur.
Estelle's face changed shape. She smiled like a statue at first, then her eyes widened.
"What are you doing, Estelle?" Lena begged as her mother opened her mouth to deny.
Then I brought out the secret ledger we had found under the straw—Estelle's list: a schedule of beatings, a tally of days withheld food, a ledger of threats toward me and other servants. The courtyard grew very quiet.
"You set them on me!" Estelle yelled. "These are lies! Who benefits? Who profits from this? It's a setup!"
A hundred heads turned. Phones—no, small carved viewing stones—started in hands. Fingers recorded. The murmur became a roar.
"Do you see?" I said. "The ledger ties you to hired goons who 'accidentally' catch those who try to join sect exams. It ties you to extortion of temple funds. The villagers have sworn. The ledger links names to payments."
"You're lying," Estelle shrieked. Her tone shifted from scorn to a tremor I had seen a hundred times in different worlds: the moment the con collapses.
"She can't be—" Lena's voice broke.
A woman in the crowd raised her hand, shaking and pale. "I was paid to stay quiet," she said. "They threatened my child. They told me—"
"You're covered in muck every harvest night!" another shouted. "We all are!"
Estelle's face, once a grotesque mask of certainty, began to chip. "No, no—I did not—"
"Save it," I said.
Now the punishment. The crowd leaned forward, the air thick with curiosity. I wanted the punishment to be public, to show that cruelty had consequences, and that the sect would not allow abuse under its roof anymore. I wanted them to learn, and I wanted witnesses who would keep the change in memory.
"Estelle Hofmann and Lena Buckner," Lennox announced. "By our sect's law, and by witness, you shall be stripped of your claims. You will kneel in the courtyard for the hour of the morning sun. You will step onto the platform of shame. You will read the ledger aloud. And you will publicly beg forgiveness."
Estelle laughed, a brittle thing. "This is a witch hunt."
"Do it," I said.
Estelle climbed the platform with the sort of arrogance that was a mask now turned to thin paper. She stood tall while the sun warmed her face—then the first sound of the crowd hit her: a hundred accusations, spat like stones.
"I was not in the house that night!" she cried, then the ledger was passed and hands read accusations, names, dates. Children who had been silenced before now repeated the words they had been taught: "She hit me." "She poured cold water." "She would lock us in the cold."
Her face, so used to wielding anger like a blade, faltered. "You promised me! You—" She pointed at Lena like a lifeline.
Lena watched her mother's voice crumble. For a moment Lena's arrogance flickered into disbelief. She started to deny, to call the witnesses liars. Her voice turned small and high. "No, that's not true!" Her cheeks were pale and she kept stepping back.
The crowd shifted. Someone pushed a recorder forward. People took photos and whispered. Men who had once looked the other way now shouted, "Shame!" Women who had been fearful nodded.
Then the denial gave out. Estelle's voice caught. "I didn't—" she said, and sounded like someone trying to hold saltwater in a sieve.
"What happened?" a merchant asked, blessed with bluntness.
"I—" Estelle could not finish.
"You lied," I said simply. "You told yourself you were right because it made you feel safe. You told Lena to be cruel because cruelty keeps the weak in place. Now you see your ledger, your tally of harm paid to keep silence." I spoke softly so the old reputations could not drown the truth. "You chose to abuse. You will choose your atonement now."
The arc of her expression moved exactly as the mandate required: proud, then shocked, then denial, then collapse. She sank to her knees, hands clutching at the wooden stand. Lena dropped beside her, weeping now without embarrassed rage.
"Please," Estelle whispered. It was a whisper of a woman who had spent a lifetime pretending she was inevitable.
"Beg," the crowd urged. Phones—carved viewing stones—clicked. A child came forward and pushed a hand into Estelle's, and the woman recoiled. For a heartbeat she looked like someone who had been unscripted.
"Forgive me," she said, hoarse. "Please—"
"Audible," I said. She repeated the words, and the courtyard was a bowl of murmurs. People whispered, some cheering, some crying. Cameras rolled. I watched their faces: arrogance crumpled, then pleading, then broken.
"Do you promise to stop your schemes?" Lennox asked.
"We will—" Lena began. "We will do anything."
"Anything?" I echoed.
"Yes—no—" Estelle's voice split. The courage that had once been a pretense now collapsed into supplication.
"Then work in the infirmary for three years. You will cook and clean without pay. You will speak in the village square tomorrow at dawn. You will return every harvest and plant trees for those you harmed," I said.
Estelle looked up like a beggar offered bread. "No, please!"
"Do it," I said.
She fell to the ground and sucked at the earth. Her defenses were gone. The crowd watched as the woman and daughter were forced to inventory the harm they'd done out loud. Their chest heaved and their voices cracked. They asked for forgiveness again and again. People recorded the desperate performance. Some clapped. Some cried. The video of that hour would be shared for days, and their kneeling posture—their shame—would be the seed of the change I wanted.
Lena's face, once smug and cruel, was slick with tears. The crowd revolted between disgust and the satisfying justice of a long-suppressed truth brought to light. Lena tried to steel herself and deny, then stopped. She finally muttered, "I'm sorry," and the sound was thin as paper, yet it counted.
After an hour they were escorted away. I could see their steps were the steps of people learning to be smaller.
The system cheered in my head for a moment, then went quiet.
"Good job," Lennox whispered afterward.
"I did what needed doing," I said.
Two days later, a group came by, bringing a badly wounded man in black. He stumbled, slumped onto my floor, and the world tilted: he looked like a carved statue, but more dangerous. He was bleeding and half-poisoned.
"He is from the Flowing Cloud sect," the boy said in a hush. "He is grand and cold. I think—"
"Let me see him," I said.
He had a mask. I tore it off. The man beneath was the kind of strange that made the world hold its breath. Ezra Henderson. Flowing Cloud's leader. He had been stabbed and poisoned. He tried to push me away like a wounded animal.
"Don't make a sound," the black-clad man said, and I realized he couldn't speak convincingly with a mouth full of poison. He moaned. His eyes snapped open and fixed on mine like steel struck to fire.
"Help me," he whispered.
"I saved people before," I said, and pulled bandages from the system box. I worked on his wounds: disinfect, bind. He trembled.
"You're a thief," he said suddenly, voice rough.
"I'm a retiree in training," I replied.
He lurched forward and tried to bite—then froze. His pupils dilated. He put his forehead on mine. "You stole my first breath," he muttered like a man stunned by taste.
"Then you must make me responsible," I said, dangerously light.
He stared. "I will replace what you take," he said finally. He slid a small token across the table: a Flowing Cloud token.
"Deal," I said, and then he fainted.
He left like smoke. He had given me an invitation to his sect and then vanished. I was stuck with a golden token, a handprint of future trouble, and a heart that kicked like a caged bird.
The Flowing Cloud sect is proud and neat. They don't trust outsiders. They definitely don't trust a gold-spirit who doesn't cultivate. Yet there I was: kidnapped back by Ezra Henderson to their halls after a staged "rescue." He said I had to finish a "Strengthening" regimen—their secret path to health—before I could leave.
"Teach me," I told him.
"I will not," he said.
"Then I'll beg," I countered.
"You beg poorly," he said.
"You sure you don't like begging?" I teased, and he left like a man shot by something tender.
We were bound together at the wrist for a while with a ceremonial gift: a pair of dragon-etched manacles. They clicked on me with an icy cold that bit into the bone; then, with a twist of fate, they closed around his wrist too. The teeth of the metal bit into our skin.
"Unhand me," he said.
"You're the one who tied us," I pointed out.
He tried to stay aloof, but then the cold seeped. He was a man used to having heat and distance, but the cold—thousand-year iron—made the edges of his posture soften. He held my hand to warm it. I pretended to be indignant.
"You're sweating," I said in the dark of his room.
"Weather," he said.
"You like me," I said bluntly.
"No."
"You do."
"Ridiculous."
I kept pushing. He kept denying. But when we walked through the courtyard with his black robes and my simple travel robe, heads turned. Flowing Cloud's doctors ran after a rumor of a petition: Bai Lan had come for its secret methods. Lennox and his crew tried to storm the gate to "rescue" me, dwarfed by the Flowing Cloud defenses.
In the pressure of that crowd, they saw our chained hands. Lennox raged.
"You're keeping our little sister!" he shouted.
"She is here," a guard said. "By order of the Flowing Cloud sect."
"Return her!" Lennox demanded.
"I will not," Ezra said slowly. "Not while the manacles remain locked."
"What manacles?" Lennox spat.
He could not see the metal between my wrist and his, which looked to everyone like a symbol of intimacy.
"You kept her in the house?" Lennox roared. "You are a thief!"
"You provoked them," I said.
The courtyard erupted. Accusations flew. Then—Ezra's face flattened. He planted his feet on the ground like iron. He stepped forward and drew his spirit sword, and the brawling men stopped on the scent of something fierce.
"She will remain," he said. "Because you will stop fighting."
"Stop fighting?" Lennox scoffed. "We will not be told what to do by—"
"Stop," Ezra repeated. Instantly the men quieted as if a tide had fallen. It was terrifying and necessary.
"Prove your loyalty," he told me in a low voice later, after he had the keys brought.
"How?" I asked.
"Train," he said. "Finish the Strengthening."
I nagged. I whined. He taught. I learned, grudgingly. The strange thing was, the more my bones warmed, the more he seemed to unfreeze.
We were two strange people above a simmering world. I planted my little vegetable patch at Flowing Cloud one slow night because I could not bear to leave my greens to wither. Ezra watched, inscrutable.
"You can't run the world with vegetables," he said once.
"You can't fix a man who refuses to feel with war," I replied.
He brushed his fingers across the leaves I'd rescued, then left.
Months passed—no, don't say months. We do not summarize our growth in abstract time. We lived training sets that finished in the sweat of the courtyard, stolen conversations in the hall, and once, a stolen kiss that was not finished because Ezra bolted like a frightened animal. He left me with a token: "If you leave, I will not look."
I didn't leave. Which was a choice that unfurled a new complication: rivalry for affection within Flowing Cloud. A woman named Stella Schmitz, pale as moonlight, watched us with quiet eyes. She had loved Ezra long from the walls. She was graceful and kind. At first I envied the way she moved in the sect like a poem.
"Do you like him?" I asked once, slicing vegetables.
"Only as a leader," she said. "You are different."
"Different good or different bad?" I poked.
"Good," she said.
I believed her.
Some enemies arrive like a blade, some like a rumor. Our rupture came with a sickly green snake in a poisonous ravine. On a rescue mission, I plunged a dagger into a snake, and while we fought, a Battered disciple named Dev Elliott collapsed with the green-venomed bite. He had been a student of ours.
"Bring medical aid!" the others cried.
"Back to Flowing Cloud," Ezra said, but the distance meant death.
Dev produced a key from his ragged chest as he faded, and with a dying whisper gave it to Ezra. He had been clutching something small. I found the key and used the system box to make a tiny pharmacy. I injected and bandaged and scrubbed at the poison like a demon who would not die trying. The world held its breath. Dev's eyes fluttered. He coughed and then cleared.
"Who did this?" he asked hoarsely.
"No time," I said. "You rest."
The miracle was small, but it mattered. The whole sect watched me with a new light in their eyes.
"You're something," Ezra told me once later, when the moon hung like a coin and Stella hummed in a room down the hall.
"I fix problems," I said. "I don't fall in love."
He looked at me like I had said a thing that filled the sea with fish.
One night, a thief from Bai Lan tried to steal Flowing Cloud's heirloom sword. Lennox and the boys plotted to sneak in—his rescue mission now a bizarre plan to retrieve "their little sister." They dressed one of themselves as a woman, tripped the gate, and were thrown out with humiliation from the guards. I was equal parts appalled and tickled.
Then came the worse thing: the two disciples at the gate—Orlando Kuznetsov and another—came poking at the wrong place. Orlando shoved me. I snapped. I learned a lot in ugly places and I had a mean left hand.
"Hey!" I said and translated it into bone for him. He screamed, collapsed, and the whole courtyard watched.
Stella watched me with something like a smile that was not about laughter. She moved closer.
"You have a temper," she said.
"I have survival skills," I corrected.
"Same," she smiled.
A tango of days later, we came home to see news: Bai Lan had burned an estate to the ground to maintain dominance. The leader had been shamefully revealed to be an extortioner, and their men had been forced to kneel publicly for their crimes. That was the moment when I realized this world could be changed with the right humiliation and the right mercy—a ritual to make cruelty unprofitable and community rewarded.
Ezra's contests of temper and my wooden fish, my small garden, the gold pillar's memory—these things stitched together a life. I fed the garden. I carved a little wooden fish I hit as I planned the next reforms.
"You'll stay when this is fixed?" Ezra asked once, because he had stopped saying "I don't want you."
"I will," I said, and smacked a wooden fish with a rhythm of a clock. "But you owe me a retirement plan."
He looked almost shy then. "You saved men," he said. "You bent worlds."
"I bent one," I said, "and I'll leave it better."
For the record: Estelle and Lena were publicly punished for over an hour in the courtyard with the witnesses required by the old laws—their collapse, denial, and begging were recorded and disseminated; that punishment changed how the village treated women and servants. The manacles that bound Ezra and me—once cruel—became the symbol of two stubborn people who would not let cruelty ride. The little vegetable patch—my green rebellion—still grows outside Flowing Cloud's kitchen.
"Will you miss it?" Stella asked me once as she handed over a plate of delicate cakes. "When you leave."
"I will miss the woodfish and the way your cooking catches the morning," I told her.
She laughed, and Ezra, who overheard, looked like he wanted to say something but hid it behind a polite cough.
"Promise me something," I said, but I caught myself. Promises are dull things. Instead I pressed a warm cake into Stella's hand and offered one to Ezra. He ate.
One night, when the wind smelled of frost and the garden bowed with dew, I held a wooden fish in my hand, tapped it once. It sang the same little "tok" it had in the hut where I first repaired a fault. Ezra watched me, and for the first time he did not turn away from warmth.
"Keep the fish," he said.
"I will," I replied. "You keep watering my greens."
"Deal."
I have fixed worlds before. I will always fix one more if a village, a woman, a sect, or a man needs it. But this last one taught me that power with humor and the right kind of shove can change hearts.
I lay the wooden fish on the sill that night and listened to it echo against my palm: tok, tok, softly counting the beat of a small garden and two people learning to share a bed that was not always hot or cold. The system still chirped occasionally, but it was not the boss of me now.
In the light of morning, I planted a new row of greens and wound the wooden fish tight. "Tick," I said, because to me it sounded like retirement counting down. Ezra stood close, hand finding mine, and the garden smelled like victory and soil and promise.
"Don't let them forget to water," I told him.
He squeezed my hand once, a small, private promise.
"Never," he said.
We both knew the world is stubborn in its ways; people are stubborn too. But for now, the seeds were planted, the ledger was public, and the wooden fish kept its little counting. The rest could be fixed day by day.
The End
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